Google App Engine Blog

News, notes, tips and tricks from the Google App Engine Team

Monday, April 7, 2008

At tonight's Campfire One we launched a preview release of Google App Engine -- a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies

Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)

Automatic scaling and load balancing

Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email

Fully featured local development environment

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.

Today's launch is a preview release -- we're by no means feature-complete, and we're giving you early access because we really want your feedback. This preview of Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, and we plan to increase that number in near future.

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

If you'd like to try it out, sign up for access to the preview release and then download the SDK to get started. The best place to give us feedback is in the discussion group. Future announcements from us will appear there and/or this blog.